How to choose images for your newsletter
Most newsletter writers either over-use stock photography or skip images entirely. Both hurt engagement. Here is the practical middle ground.
Images make newsletters harder to land in inboxes, slower to load, and easier to misread. They also dramatically improve engagement when used well. The trick is knowing when an image earns its place and when it does not.
Here is the practical version.
The case against most images
Three reasons writers should be more sceptical of images than they usually are.
Mailbox providers treat heavy image-to-text ratios as a spam signal. Emails that are mostly images with very little text get filtered more aggressively. The classic spam pattern (one big image with no text) is a reliable spam-folder ticket.
Images load slowly on poor connections. Newsletter readers frequently open on mobile data, on overloaded office wifi, in airport lounges. A heavy newsletter with five large images delivers a worse reading experience than a light one with no images at all.
Stock photography in particular signals "marketing email" before the reader has processed the content. A handshake on a glass building, a smiling team in a conference room, a laptop with a coffee. The reader's brain has seen these images thousands of times. They register as filler.
Most newsletters are improved by removing roughly half their images.
When images earn their place
Three uses where images genuinely add value.
Real images of real things you are showing. A product, a screenshot of a chart, a photograph of an event you ran, a before-and-after of work you have done. Specific images that show something the reader cannot understand from words alone.
Charts and data visualisations. A line chart showing market trends, a bar chart comparing options, a screenshot of analytics. Numbers told visually convey more in a glance than in two paragraphs of prose.
Personal photos in personal newsletters. A photo from your week, a sketch you made, a snapshot of your workspace. These work in personal-voice newsletters because they reinforce the personal connection. They do not work in B2B industry newsletters where the reader did not subscribe for personal content.
If your image does not fall into one of these three buckets, consider whether it is doing real work or just decorating.
Stock photography, briefly
Stock photography is rarely worth using.
The exceptions are narrow. If you genuinely cannot photograph the thing you want to show (a concept, a metaphor, a place you cannot visit), thoughtfully chosen stock can work. The best free sources (Unsplash, Pexels) have moved beyond the worst of the corporate-handshake era.
But even then, the question is whether the image is doing more work than a well-written first sentence would do. The answer is often no.
If you do use stock, avoid:
Generic business imagery (handshakes, charts in foreground with city skyline background, conference rooms).
Smiling models in office settings.
Anything that has clearly been used by other businesses.
Lifestyle photography that has nothing to do with your content.
Image specs
Once you have decided to include an image, get the technical bits right.
File size matters. Images larger than 200KB slow load time meaningfully on mobile. Compress them. Tools like TinyPNG or Squoosh handle this in seconds.
Width matters. Email clients display roughly 600 pixels wide for most desktop layouts. Mobile is narrower. Images larger than 1200 pixels wide are wasted bytes for most readers.
File format matters. JPG for photographs. PNG for screenshots, illustrations, or anything with transparency. WebP if your ESP supports it (many still do not). Avoid GIFs unless animation is genuinely useful; GIFs are heavy and many email clients strip them.
Alt text matters. Always include alt text for accessibility and for the case where images do not load (Outlook with images blocked is the classic example). Alt text should describe what the image shows in plain language.
Aspect ratio and layout
Wide images (landscape orientation) work better in most email layouts than tall ones. The reader is scrolling vertically; tall images steal too much vertical real estate.
If you embed an image in line with text, the most readable layouts are:
Image at the top of a section with text below. Familiar magazine layout, easy to read.
Small image to the side of text (left or right alignment). Works in some templates, breaks in others. Test before relying on it.
A series of small images in a row. Useful for showing multiple products or before-and-after sequences. Usually breaks on mobile, where the row stacks vertically.
Avoid:
Text overlaid on images. Most email clients do not handle this gracefully. The text becomes part of the image, which means it cannot be read by screen readers, cannot be translated, and cannot be selected.
Background images. Outlook in particular does not support them reliably. Test before using.
Decorative dividers and frames. They add weight without adding value.
Photographing your own work
If you produce or sell physical products, your own photographs almost always outperform stock.
You do not need a professional studio. A reasonably modern phone, decent natural light, and a clean background produce images that work fine for newsletter purposes. The lighting matters more than the camera.
For ecommerce in particular, photographs of your products being used by real people (with permission) outperform studio shots. Customer photos, employee photos, photos from your retail location all signal authenticity in a way that polished imagery does not.
Charts and data visualisations
If you publish numbers, a simple chart often communicates the point much faster than a paragraph of prose.
Keep charts simple. One or two trends per chart. Clear labels. Restrained colours. Tools like Datawrapper, Chart.js, or even spreadsheet exports produce clean charts that work well in email.
Avoid:
Cluttered dashboards with five trends crammed into one chart.
Charts with no axis labels or no legend. Readers cannot interpret these without context.
Heavy 3D effects, gradients, or decorative chart styles that obscure the data.
Always include a one-sentence caption explaining the chart. Some readers will scan only the chart and the caption, not the surrounding paragraphs.
Mobile considerations
A meaningful share of newsletter opens happen on mobile. Industry data from Litmus and Email on Acid puts mobile open share around 50-65% across most categories.
Test images on actual mobile devices, not just desktop previews. Common mobile-specific failures:
Images that are too wide and force horizontal scrolling.
Text on images that becomes unreadable at small sizes.
Multiple-image rows that stack awkwardly when the layout responds.
Slow-loading images that delay the reader's first meaningful interaction.
Images do not break on mobile if you keep them simple and reasonably sized.
When to use no images at all
Many of the best newsletters use almost no images.
Consider going image-free if:
Your content is text-driven (essays, analysis, opinion).
Your audience prefers fast-loading, scannable email.
You write a personal-voice newsletter where images would feel performative.
Your sender reputation is shaky (heavy image use can compound deliverability issues).
You do not have time to source good images.
Image-free newsletters often have better deliverability, faster load times, higher click-through rates, and a cleaner reading experience. The tradeoff is they look less polished. For most B2B and serious-content newsletters, this is a tradeoff worth making.
The honest summary
The best images are real, useful, and earn their place. The worst are generic, decorative, and slow your email down.
If you are not sure whether an image earns its place, leave it out. The newsletter will be better without it.
For more on the writing side, see the anatomy of a high-performing email newsletter.
Cheers.